Not Everything Has Changed
by Punzie the Platypus
Summary: It is 1998 and he is seven-years-old and she is six-years-old and he is bright and brown-haired and always grinning and she is tiny and bouncy and bright and beautiful. Little looks into some summers spent at Luke's farmhouse and lake.


_**Soli Deo gloria**_

**DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own The Mortal Instruments or any of the mentioned video game characters. I think you will know who this is about. :)**

It is 1998 and he is seven-years-old and she is six-years-old and he is bright and brown-haired and always grinning and she is tiny and bouncy and bright and beautiful. They are best friends that share his Nintendo and her toy phone on the drive up to her friend Luke's farm. They are best friends who jump out of the car and race first to the lake and then get lost in the barn's loft. They are best friends who scare the living daylights out of her mom and her friend Luke. They are best friends who cause the police to come out on their first day of vacation and they stay by each other's side as they are scolded soundly, handed water bottles and cheese sticks and pretzel sticks for their first night's dinner, and are sent to their sleeping bags in the big office-like room in her friend Luke's farmhouse. And they are best friends who laugh and promise to stay up all night long, but she falls asleep before ten and he watches her in the dark (nightlights are for babies) until eleven reads the red digital clock and he is sound asleep.

* * *

It is 2001 and he is ten-years-old and shouldn't like girls because they are gross and full of cooties and she is nine-years-old and isn't supposed to play with boys because they are gross and mean but they stay up late one night in a tree house her friend Luke helped them make. Their nails are marked with bruises and she has a bandage from hitting it with a hammer. Their tree house is freshly painted. Her whole wall, her very own wall, is covered in trees and flowers and dragons and fairies and exotic creatures. His wall is covered in video game characters and he says hers is better and she says no.

Her mother gets worried. Her wall is covered with a fresh coat of white paint by the next morning and she is angry at her friend Luke, who has spots of white paint all over his hairy arm, and her mother, who presses her lips together and holds it all in.

He digs out the paints he was going to give her for her birthday and helps her paint quote-on-quote normal stuff. She laughs and gets paint in her dark hair. He grins and loves her smile.

He shouldn't like girls, but he likes her. She shouldn't play with boys but she beats him at Mario.

* * *

It is 2004 and he is thirteen-years-old and she is twelve-years-old and neither should be allowed to drive a motor boat. Her mom wants none of it and her friend Luke finally gives in after they plead and beg and reason and band together. They get up at five and nearly fall asleep in their boat, which starts to sink in the middle of the lake, taking on water and already filled with too much supplies. She yells that they didn't need the rope he had brought at all and he bails the boat and as the sun rises, they scream and her friend Luke races to the lake and her mom nearly has a heart attack on the beach as he swims out and catches her and him.

They both are swallowed in towels and scolded soundly while they secretly roll eyes together. They had had totally everything under control. He thinks she looks beautiful with wet red hair and she wonders if he notices her new bikini, the one her mother doesn't like.

* * *

It is 2006 and he is fifteen-years-old and gangly and nerdy and she is fourteen-years-old and petite and pale. He has been hit with puberty head-on and is covered in acne and he smells like old socks all the time and she has practically no puberty and stuffs her bra and chases him when he teases her about her tiny height. They sit in the tractor and discuss how school sucks and how many chores her friend Luke has heaped on their backs this year and the tractor accidentally is started by a pushing of a lever and they careen across the yard. She screeches and shrieks and he curses and groans and they run through her mom's begonias and roses and tomatoes and they crash into the pen full of goats that her friend Luke keeps for the farmer who visits his grandchildren every summer for three weeks.

They are scolded soundly and punished and they communicate through knocks on the walls. Their cellphones are gone and so they talk and count the stars together, though a wall and a door separates them. She laughs and is comforted because he wasn't taken away from her and he hurts because she was taken away from him.

* * *

It is 2007 and there is no summer trip to her friend Luke's farmhouse and lake.

* * *

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It is 2023 and he is sixteen-years-old and she is thirty-one-years-old. He should be thirty two, but he is gangly and handsome and brown-haired and bright and still so boyish. She is curvy and well-dressed and still short and still red-haired. He is still single and she is married with two children and a blond husband.

He drives in a pickup. She drives in a sedan. It's sunset when they arrive at the same time and they get out without saying a word. They look over the lake and he remembers how he was a hero once, just once, because she had made him one. She had told him later he was a hero and he had accepted that answer.

She smiles and they go to the tree house and take up all the room. The fairies still stick out under the white paint and she traces them and he grins at the garish looking Pokémon and they get out and walk on the well-worn dirt, not yet ready to join her mom and her stepfather Luke in his farmhouse.

"We used to be so innocent," Clary says.

"Innocent? We were a bunch of troublemakers who broke every rule and trampled them while laughing maniacally," Simon says.

She grins. He laughs.

It is 2023 and he is still bright and brown-haired with an occasional grin and she is still tiny and bright and bouncy and beautiful.

Not all things remained the same, but they are best friends who live life together and that can never change. Everything else can, maybe, but not them. Just not them. They are best friends and untouchable.

**I really like how Simon/Clary were tested as a couple, and they didn't work out too well, and yet—MALE-FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IS RETAINED. YES.**

**Thanks for reading!**


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